Products: File Downloads

Overview

Hotcakes gives you the ability to associate files with a specific product. Your customer can download a file for items such as software.  Another example might be a PDF user guide for an appliance.  Regardless, you can also control how many times the file can be accessed, and customers won't be able to navigate directly to the file either.  Your intellectual property is protected.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
• Have a file to save to the product

Getting Started

In order to follow along with this article, you should have at least one product and a file that you wish to associate with that product.

Products: File Downloads

In order to edit the downloads for a product, you first need to be editing the product.  Once you are, then choose the "File Downloads" menu item from the left panel.

You'll see the file download form, followed by the list of any files you may have already assigned to the product.

Files that you already see here 

Setting	Description
Upload a New File to the Site	Use the option to upload, only if you haven't already uploaded the file you want to use.  Otherwise, use the next setting to select the existing file.  The browse feature uses the built-in file browser that you use on any other website.
Use a File That Has Already Been Uploaded	This drop down list will contain files that may have been uploaded from another product or from within the File Vault feature.  You should use this only if you're not going to upload a file.  The file upload will be used if any file is present, instead of this setting.
Short Description	The short description will initially be the file name of the file, but you can rename it to anything that you'd like.
Available For	If you would like for access to this file to expire, select the duration that the file should be available.  This is per product, per customer.  Leave these fields unchanged if you wish to not specify a time limit.
Number of Times File Can Be Downloaded	Sometimes, you'd prefer that a file is only downloaded a certain number of times.  For example, if you sell software, you might want this value to be 1.  If you don't want to restrict the number of times the file is downloaded, then leave this setting blank.  Otherwise, enter a whole number of any positive value.

Once you have one or more files associated to the product, you'll see them listed below the form.

In the grid, you'll be able to see the file's description you gave it, and you can test the download.  You can even remove the file and start over if you wish to change how it's applied in some way.

Custom Interaction

Once your product has one or more files associated with it, they'll be displayed to the customer, but only after payment has been successfully completed.  They'll see the downloads on the receipt and order history detail views.